R&D - the essential conditions

One of the most important aspects of successful R&D in schools is to consider the essential conditions that are necessary to grow the innovation from ideas to impact on learning.  Chapter 5 of R&D Your School outlines the 8 essential elements for this growth:

1. Empowered leaders - which includes the framework within the school, a process for prototyping new practices and approaches and a commitment to innovation.
2. Engaged communities - both within the school and beyond.  It is essential to develop partnerships in the global community.
3. Intrinsic motivation - as it is impossible to force people to change.  At the heart of motivation are agency to make decisions and to act, expertise (knowledge and skills) and connection with peers to share the work.
4. Future connection - it's important to understand global trends and how these will impact learning.
5. Skill capacity - including recruiting curious, self-directed individuals and then encouraging professional learning and applied practice focused on innovation.
6. Resource capacity - including a budget, facilities and materials.
7. Design thinking competence embedded as a core process for research, capacity building and innovation (for example an always beta culture of ongoing development)
8. Impact validity - R&D work is democratically developed using multiple perspectives, deepens understanding and provides new answers and new questions.  It's important that data is used to support R&D conclusions and that R&D work and its impact on learning is communicated to the community.

Chapter 5 of R&D Your School contains more information about all of these essential conditions as well as an outline of an innovation audit that can be used to assess whether your school is ready for effective R&D work.  This will help you to identify the important conditions that you need to grow, in order for innovation to succeed in your school.  If you would like a copy of R&D Your School it's available on Kindle and costs just $5.

If you would like to know more about how ASB can help you, please visit ReD Solutions which contains information about school innovation, technology integration, Maker, Design Thinking, social entrepreneurship and collaboratives.